Rev. Irene Monroe is a Ford Fellow and doctoral candidate at Harvard Divinity School. One of Monroe’s outreach ministries is the several religion columns she writes - “The Religion Thang,” for In Newsweekly, the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender newspaper that circulates widely throughout New England, “Faith Matters” for The Advocate Magazine, a national gay & lesbian magazine, and “Queer Take,” for The Witness, a progressive Episcopalian journal. Her writings have also appeared in Boston Herald and in the Boston Globe. Her award-winning essay, “Louis Farrakhan’s Ministry of Misogyny and Homophobia”, was greeted with critical acclaim.

Irene Monroe: While many LGBTQ communities of color will embraced the larger LGBTQ community’s offers to be inclusive, others feel that the white queer community, in 2015, is coming a day late and a dollar short.

Irene Monroe: We clearly see the geopolitics of a soft church bureaucrat evangelizing to today’s shrinking American Catholic Church—an institution that is less churched, less married, less white, and less conservative.

Irene Monroe: “The reality of unarmed African American women being beaten, profiled, sexually violated and murdered by law enforcement officials with alarming regularity is too often ignored – especially with the focus of police brutality on African African males.”

Rev. Irene Monroe: The Atlanta-based family-owned fast food fried chicken chain Chick-fil-A can now, with the state’s sanctioning of House Bill 1023, openly and legally discriminate in their hiring practices of Jews, divorcees or LGBTQ people based on their Southern Baptist beliefs.

LGBT Rights

Irene Monroe: Long before June officially became Gay Pride Month, and October “Coming Out Month” for the LGBTQ community, Halloween was unofficially our yearly celebrated “holiday,” dating as far back at the 1970s when it was a massive annual street party in San Francisco’s Castro district.

The Middle East

Richard Greeman: Anti-government demonstrations spread across Morocco after social media spread the story of Mousine Fikri, a fishmonger crushed to death inside a garbage truck as he tried to block the destruction of a truckload of his fish confiscated by police.